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Best 12 Places to Learn Pro Tools With Online Courses & Tutorials

by
Philip Rudy
November 2, 2019 • 8 min read

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Wondering where to go to learn how to use Pro Tools other than the small selection of free videos we offer on this site? Here is a pretty extensive list to help get you started in the right direction.

Online Pro Tools Tutorials & Courses in This Article

Top Pick: Udemy Music Production Tutorials

Udemy has amazing courses with hours of video lessons that can help bring you up to speed, and start recording with better results.

What’s great about Udemy is all of their courses are just a one time fee. You won’t get sucked into contracts, meaning you can watch and learn at your own pace. Often times the fee is similar to a monthly price you might pay for another service (like LinkedInLearning.com).

Top Pick: Berklee College of Music Course

The renowned Berklee College of Music offers several courses to get you started in Pro Tools or help you hone your skills. In addition to regular intro courses, Berklee offers specialty courses in mixing/mastering, producing, and more. Most courses are 12 weeks. If you want to use Pro Tools professionally (and use it in a way that will draw more people to your business), then a certificate program may work best for you. An advantage of the Berklee certificate courses is that they provide you with an official certification attractive to potential clients.

Try their course, Pro Tools Basics. This course currently has a 4.7 star rating with over 17,000 students who have enrolled.

LinkedIn Learning

At this time you can get a 30-day FREE trial. So you can start learning today, and see if their courses are worth it.

LinkedIn Learning offers a smorgasbord of courses on various websites and software. You can even take courses on how to use Facebook and Pinterest. Most of LinkedIn Learning focuses on heavy hitters like AutoCAD and other industry-specific software. At the time of this writing, LinkedIn Learning offers over 50 courses in Pro Tools specifically. Most tutorials are by experienced field experts – a visit to the Pro Tools page reveals that among the experts is Larry Crane, who has worked with The Decemberists, Jenny Lewis, Elliott Smith, and many other acclaimed artists. Crane’s tutorial covers how to get more life and energy out of your tracks. It’s a specific focus, and you might worry that LinkedIn Learning only focuses on specific, niche-oriented training, but it includes basic training as well.

Pricing & Instructors:

LinkedIn Learning requires a membership, but costs pale in comparison to many “official” Pro Tools classes. The most popular membership is $29/month. The main advantage of this membership is that there are no long-term contracts – you can just pay for a month and see how LinkedIn Learning works for you to start. Among the several membership options is an annual membership at $19.99 a month. It’s worth noting that these fees aren’t just for Pro Tools – they grant you access to Lynda’s other courses.

Bottom line: LinkedIn Learning gives you a significant bang for your buck in terms of learning Pro Tools. Your tutorial teachers are experts – college professors, award winners, authors of Pro Tools books – not random people on YouTube. The many memberships fit virtually anyone’s budget. It doesn’t take much to access this tool, but you’re essentially guaranteed to learn a lot from qualified people. The making money option doesn’t hurt, either. It’s a large site, but the specialized tutorials can make it feel smaller in a good way.

Avid

If you’re a crowdsourcer by nature, Avid.com might be the site for you. Avid sells Pro Tools and other audio software and offers services, but perhaps the best resource here is the plethora of forums and communities. While tutorial videos can show you how to plenty of things on Pro Tools, they can’t directly answer your questions. Avid forums are full of experts and new users answering questions and asking them. The meticulous organization makes them navigable and ultimately saves you time in getting your questions answered. Another benefit? When teachers say they learn from their students, they aren’t kidding. Once you are an expert (or maybe even solidly proficient) in the use of Pro Tools, you can answer questions on the forums, too. Answering people’s questions, combined with using the product yourself, keeps your knowledge fresh and flexible. It’s a win-win.

Avid.com communities fall across a few large subgroups before they specialize. A good one for beginners to frequent is the Avid Pro Audio Community. Essentially a giant question and answer session, this forum can help the greenest beginner start in Pro Tools. You can post questions in sub-forums dedicated to specific versions of Pro Tools and in other categories like virtual instruments, etc.

The biggest forum/resource with Avid is the Avid Community. This vast resource features blog posts, forums where professionals can answer user questions on software, user groups, and video tutorials.

What sets the Avid Community resource apart? It’s probably the most diverse one on the table. The ease-of-use factor is huge – you have expert-frequented forums, blog posts and tips, video tutorials, and more all on one subpage of one website. It’s a good place to go if you want to (or are able to) absorb a lot of information in a short amount of time. Though Avid Community isn’t Pro Tools specific, it does contain blogs that follow and discuss industry trends. This can be helpful to beginners and experienced users alike.

The lowdown on Avid and the forums:

Forums and videos are free – a good thing for everyone.

The Pro Tools forum/community is time-efficient. You can see a video and post a question about it on the forum without leaving the main webpage.

Audiotuts+

The Tuts (short for “tutorials”) websites have specific instructions, usually replete with videos and/or pictures, on how to do just about anything. A disadvantage of major sites like this one is that they tend to be hard to root through to find what you need. Luckily, Audiotuts+ has a collection of 11 essential tutorials for a Pro Tools user. Like Lynda, Audiotuts+ sources established musicians and sound engineers to do tutorials. It does a good job of protecting you and your work from the influence of unqualified YouTube randos. While at present there are just the 11 videos, Audiotuts+ adds new tutorials regularly, and it also brings back AudioJungle archive pieces – articles that were once posted on a relocated site. While some of the videos here are posted on YouTube, they have been culled from an impressive slush pile of tutorial videos. You can be sure Audiotuts+ brings you the best of them.

Mac Pro Video

You can find some of their videos on iTunes, but a dedicated list is here. Mac Pro Video is a learning partner with Avid, so the makers of these videos know their stuff. They advertise that the purpose of their videos is to help you study for your Pro Tools 10 certification. Even if you don’t plan on getting certified, you can learn a huge amount. An advantage is that these are step by step – they take you from basic familiarity to expert tricks. The full-course option is good for you if you’re busy and want built-in scheduling that you can follow whenever you want to. Mac Pro Video includes videos for most versions of Pro Tools, too.

Sound on Sound Archive

In our day of internet problem-solving, interactive solutions, and more, magazines may seem like something from the dark ages. This is especially true in the music and sound industries – industries that have a strong correlation to and connection with technological development. However, sound-industry magazines often have valuable tips, ideas, etc. pertaining to sound. While Sound on Sound may not have full courses in Pro Tools software, it certainly has useful articles. However, it’s one thing to say “go check magazine archives” and another to actually do it. Sorting through articles can be time-consuming. Luckily, Sound on Sound has an online archive of selected articles, notes, and tips pertaining to Pro Tools. The magazine says that the articles can help one to make the most of the software. This archive has hundreds of tips, notes, and articles. It’s definitely worth a look.

Groove 3

If you’re still looking for more Pro Tools videos, check out Groove 3. This site, unlike many other video tutorial sites mentioned, has a high priority of focus for audio engineering. One of the advantages of the advantages of this site is that you know it will have sufficient videos in Pro Tools. Often, a site that has tutorials for many software types will not be equally distributed across each one. You don’t want to get shortchanged. Groove 3, on its homepage, has videos divided up by incarnation of Pro Tools, making it easy to select and watch relevant videos.You can purchase individual video courses, and while they may be a smidge pricey, they have a professionalism about them that makes them worth at least a look.

Pro Tools Expert

The community over at Pro Tools Expert is a great place to not only learn Pro Tools on the fly but keeping up with the Avid community in itself. It is a great place to get constant updates on the software and the contributors over there are extremely involved in the product and in the music community as a whole. They are constantly posting to their twitter account and Facebook account with daily updates about the software and it is just an outstanding community to involved in if you are highly active in Pro Tools.

Virtual Training Company

The Virtual Training Company (VTC for short) offers inexpensive courses in a variety of disciplines. The training is all online, so you have the advantages of a course plus the ability to keep a flexible schedule. Some colleges and universities use this course for certain kinds of education, too.

SAE Online

A good choice for people with limited time, SAE Online offers a short course that provides a solid intro to Pro Tools. With this 101 course, you can always get yourself started on Pro Tools and then start more specialized learning once you’re actively working with the program.

The Online Audio School

If you like your training courses interactive and online, then this option is a good one for you. You can ask real-time questions and see and talk to your teachers. The Online Audio School offers a connection that is often lost online without sacrificing any of the flexibility of online classes. The school site also maintains a useful blog that can help with learning.

Free Course by Audio Assemble

Choosing A Pro Tools Education Platform

So what’s the take-away here? There are plenty of resources available to you if you want to learn Pro Tools, hone your skills in general, or learn something specific, you can find a venue. Whether you want a long-term subscription, a one-time course, or just a single video, you’ll be able to find something online. Pro Tools is one of the most versatile and valuable tools on the market today, and it seems wasteful to not get all that you can out of it. When you find and take a tutorial, you’re extending the value of an already-valuable investment. Take a tutorial. Save some money. Put Pro Tools to work for you.